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I've always loved Baron Gros as a painter. He is often regarded as a minor figure, but he was the primary influence on Romantic painters like Gericault and Delacroix, and he created a couple of the greatest paintings in history; Napoleon at the Plague House at Jaffa, and especially Napoleon at the Battle of Eylau. This last painting was as influential as Goya on the depiction of war as unheroic. He thought of himself as a traitor to his teacher David's neoclassicism, and years later put on his old Napoleonic uniform and drowned himself in the Seine. I'm such a Gros enthusiast that when I wrote the great English art historian and writer Anita Brookner, to suggest she write his biography, she wrote back to say that I should write it myself! I treasure the note. Later, she took my advice and wrote a chapter on Gros.